Our Angry Girl

Sir—While your anonymous contributor is greatly to be commended for a forceful presentation of a feminine viewpoint, she is I think inadequately aware of why the male finds it difficult to accept her claims unreservedly. Firstly, in the academic world he has found that while good female lecturers are better than most males, the best females fall far short of the best males in inspiring and evocative powers. This may be of course because the most superior females prefer to succeed in their biological role.

Furthermore this very biological factor greatly affects the female academic. Either she marries and her academic duties immediately become subordinate to the biological or she does not and her thwarted instincts distort her behaviour and impair her insights.

In the wider world of Western culture great female intellects are even more notaby absent. In the field of literature for instance the only names that come to mind are those of Sappho, George Elliot and perhaps Jane Austen.

Of these the first is known mainly by repute and not by demonstrable artifact and therefore her high position may be due more to great seductive powers over the minds of men than to intellectual stature, and the last is a great miniaturist, Queen Elizabeth is a prominent political figure and Madam Curie a somewhat pedestrian scientist.

Perhaps your contributor should accept the fact that a proportion of her sex have certain other powers enabling them to manipulate great men and events being able to make babies they should leave the, inadequate male to make art and science as a substitute. Nevertheless I for one would find the greatest pleasure and interest in reading the before and after scripts of one of her essays